Peloponnese, also spelled Peloponnesus, Modern Greek Pelopónnisos, peninsula of 8,278 square miles (21,439 square km), a large, mountainous body of land jutting southward into the Mediterranean that since antiquity has been a major region of Greece, joined to the rest of mainland Greece by the Isthmus of Corinth. The name, which is derived from Pelopos Nisos (Island of Pelops, a legendary hero), does not appear in Homer, who preferred to apply the name of Árgos, a Mycenaean city-state, to the whole peninsula. The Mycenaean civilization flourished in the 2nd millennium bce at such centres as Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos. The city-state of Sparta was long the major rival of Athens for political and economic dominion over Greece during the Classical period, from about the 5th century bce until the Roman conquest in the 2nd century. Under the Byzantine Empire the Peloponnese suffered repeated incursions by warrior tribes from the north. In the 13th century ce it was taken by the Franks, who held it for two centuries until it reverted to the last Byzantine emperors. It was conquered by the Turks in 1460. By the 14th century the Peloponnese was known as the Morea (Mulberry), first applied to Elis, a northwestern mulberry-growing district, and it was the site of the Despotate of Morea. Patras (Modern Greek: Pátrai), the major city in modern times, located in the northern Peloponnese, has continued to gain commercial importance since the War of Greek Independence (1821–29). Highways link all the major regions of the Peloponnese, and there is an independent railway network that serves all the districts except Laconia (Lakonía).

Pátrai (also called Patras) on the Gulf of Patraïkós, Peloponnese, Greece.

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...was not done in accordance with their decision.” Continuing jealousies and disputes in the Greek world offered Rome opportunities to adjudicate and ultimately to intervene once again. In the Peloponnese the Achaean League was at odds with Sparta, wishing to bring Sparta into the league and to suppress the radical social program of its king, Nabis. Flamininus in 195 supported the...

After the suppression of the Messenian revolt (perhaps not before 600), Sparta controlled much of the Peloponnese. In the 6th century it extended that control further, into Arcadia to the north, by diplomatic as well as by purely military means. On the diplomatic level, Sparta, the greatest of the Dorian states, deliberately played the anti-Dorian card in the mid-6th century in an attempt to...

Shortly after Ypsilantis’s raid into Moldavia, scattered violent incidents coalesced into a major revolt in the Peloponnese. It is said to have begun on March 25, 1821—still celebrated as Greek Independence Day—when Germanos, archbishop of Pátrai, unfurled a Greek flag at the monastery of Ayia Lavra near Kalávrita. With atrocities being committed by both sides, the...